Note: The following is an excerpt from Donna's new e-book, Flower Remedies:
How Plants' Energies Can Heal Us. It is available online only,
from Moon Maven Publications.
If you've never worked with an e-book before, see the instructions
on that site. You can do this!
The sea is a very special environment, and a variety of companies around the Pacific Rim offer essences based on the everlastingly fascinating flora and fauna of the ocean. Perhaps the first to make this type of essences was Sabina Pettitt, the founder of Pacific Essences. She explored the waters near her home in British Columbia to create a full kit of sea essences. One of Pacific Essences kits contains remedies that contain the energies of sea plants and creatures, and the following examples and observations demonstrate how potent they are.
In my flower remedy classes, we would mix one remedy each week based on our lesson and report
back on it the next. When we studied the sea essences, a class member took Mussel as her
mixture that week. She had been experiencing much irritation at her living situation, which
is called co-housing -- several families living in separate houses on the same piece of land.
She felt crowded and put-upon.
While taking the essence, she went out in their boat.
Lying so that she was looking into the water, she noticed a colony of mussels
beneath the boat. She watched for a good long time and felt very attuned to them.
What she remarked upon and felt deeply affected by was that they all live on
top of one another, higgledy-piggledy, and yet they have strong boundaries
and they all get their needs met. This taught her something valuable
about the co-housing situation, and she has never experienced the same
degree of irritation with it since.
Later, I was working by mail and phone long distance with a woman whose brother had been murdered two years earlier. The situation was very messy, and she had been consumed with grief and rage for much of that time. She had been working on her own with remedies like Pine, Holly, Willow, and Bleeding Heart for three months, but had not yet gotten much relief. My first mixture for her contained a variety of essences, including White Bleeding Heart and Cherry Plum.
She then experienced an upsurge of rage about the murder. The second mixture contained Mussel and Fireweed; both aimed at the rage, and Vine, Red Chestnut, and Pine. The results were remarkable, and I do think they mostly related to Mussel and Fireweed. (For the astrologically inclined, this is a woman with a strong Mars in Scorpio in the third house, representing both thinking patterns and siblings.)
She wrote, "My feelings of anger started to leave me before I finished this last bottle of remedies. My anger is such a long-standing pattern that I can't imagine it is totally gone this soon. I think I have used anger (partly) to cover up something else -- pain, sadness, grief, fear, etc. Sometimes it feels like the anger is the only thing that feels normal or gets me going. Without the anger, I sometimes feel like a big blob."
Although we sometimes had to work with minor recurrences of anger, they were never such a major and obsessive part of her psyche again. They mainly seemed to be related to boundary issues. In fact, it strikes me that in both these cases, the anger and the boundary issues were closely related. Perhaps Mussel heals in part by revealing underlying boundary issues that contribute to the anger.
Healing of any major trauma seems to proceed by layer after layer of emotions. Rage
is often a cover-up for an underlying grief, and so it was not a surprise that
what came up full force for her as the anger subsided was grief. I was moved
to give her Starfish, a Pacific Sea Essence related to grief, as a single remedy.
Again the results were remarkable. For the first time in two years, she was able to release much of the grief. Suddenly she had new issues of her own, unrelated to grief, that she wanted to work on. We laughed a good deal, and the remedies she wanted were more light-hearted ones like Iris, Indian Paintbrush, and Buttercup, related to creativity and using her gifts. The trend of working on her own long-standing issues like self-esteem and prosperity continued through four months, and her grief and rage seemed to have been largely resolved.
Note: Want to learn more about the sea essences? See Sabina Pettitt's
article here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: This has been an excerpt from an e-book by Donna Cunningham,
Vibration's co-editor. For more than 30 years, Donna has been a well-known author in two fields, flower essences and
astrology, and has published more than 15 books. This book, Flower Remedies:
How Plants' Energies Can Heal Us is available online only,
from Moon Maven Publications.
If you've never worked with an e-book before, see the instructions
on that site.
ART CREDITS: The layers of this treatment are based on stained glass from
the exceptional collection created by
Kokomo Opalescent Glass. Clip art
from Clip Art. Com and Photos.com.
Page design by
Donna Cunningham of
Word of Mouth Web Design. ©2004, all rights reserved.
The World Wide Essence Society does not mean to imply any recommendation of nor give certification to any individuals or companies above. This article is provided purely for informational purposes. We ask consumers to make their own determination as to quality of the services and products offered above. This article is not meant to be advice, and the information is not meant to replace medical or psychological treatment.
